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Typical Dishes in Chinese Menus

Dishes that often appear on American Chinese menus include:

• General Tso's Chicken — chunks of chicken that are deep-fried and seasoned with ginger, garlic, sesame oil, scallions, and hot chili peppers.
• Sesame Chicken— boned, battered, and deep-fried chicken which is then dressed with a translucent but dark red, sweet, slightly sour, mildly spicy, semi-thick, Chinese soy sauce made from corn starch, vinegar, chicken broth, and sugar, and often served with steamed broccoli.
• Chinese chicken salad — Salad, in the form of uncooked leafy greens, does not exist in traditional Chinese cuisine for sanitary reasons, since manure and human feces were China's primary fertilizer through most of its history.[citation needed] It usually contains crispy noodle (fried wonton skin) and sesame dressing. Some restaurants serve the salad with mandarin oranges.
• Chop suey — connotes "leftovers" in Chinese. It is usually a mix of vegetables and meat in a brown sauce but can also be served in a white sauce.
• Chow mein — literally means 'stir-fried noodles.' Chow mein consists of fried noodles with bits of meat and vegetables. It can come with chicken, beef, pork or shrimp.
• Crab rangoon — Fried wonton skins stuffed with artificial crab meat (surimi) and cream cheese. Rangoon (now Yangon) is the former capital of Burma (now Myanmar).
• Fortune cookie — Invented at the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco, fortune cookies have become sweetened and found their way to many American Chinese restaurants. Fortune cookies have become so popular that even some authentic Chinese restaurants serve them at the end of the meal as dessert and may feature Chinese translations of the English fortunes.
• Fried rice — Pan-fried rice, usually with chunks of meat, vegetables, and often egg.
• Egg drop soup — A soup of chicken broth with scrambled egg ribbons. Often served with fried noodles.
• Egg roll — While native Chinese spring rolls have a thin crispy skin with mushrooms, bamboo, and other vegetables inside, the Americanized version (specifically the version found in such American Northeast metro areas as Boston and New York) uses a thick, fried skin stuffed with cabbage and usually bits of meat or seafood (usually pork or shrimp). In other areas of the US outside of the Northeast, egg rolls tend to be of the spring roll/Panda Express variety.
• Broccoli beef — This dish exists in native Chinese form, but using gai-lan (Chinese broccoli) rather than Western broccoli.